What Is My IP Address?
An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique number assigned to your device by your internet service provider when you connect to the internet. It works like a return address on an envelope — routers use it to know where to send traffic back. IPv4 addresses look like 203.0.113.42 (four numbers, 0–255, separated by dots). IPv6 addresses look like 2001:db8::1 (hexadecimal groups separated by colons) and were introduced because the world ran out of IPv4 space. Your device likely has both assigned; which one a website sees depends on its own network configuration.
How to Find Your Public IP Address
Use the DevToolBox /my-ip tool. Open /my-ip in your browser. The tool fetches your IP directly from the browser — not a server proxy — so it always reflects the address the internet actually sees. It also shows your ISP, city, region, and timezone in one shot.
Ask your browser. Type what is my ip into Google or any search engine. The result page shows your current public IPv4 (and sometimes IPv6) at the top of the results. This works anywhere but gives you the IP only — no ISP or geolocation detail.
Use the terminal. Run curl ifconfig.me or curl ipinfo.io/ip from any shell. Both return a plain-text IP with no extra output, which is handy for scripting. curl ipinfo.io (without /ip) returns a JSON object with city, region, org, and timezone alongside the address.
What Does Your IP Address Reveal?
IP geolocation data is derived from ISP registration records and routing tables — not GPS. Here is what it reliably exposes:
- City and region (approximate). Accuracy varies. Large cities are usually correct; rural areas may resolve to the nearest major city or to wherever your ISP's nearest exchange is located.
- ISP / organization. The entity that owns the IP block — your home internet provider, your employer's network, or a cloud provider if you are behind a VPN or proxy.
- Timezone. Inferred from the registered location of the IP block. Useful for correlating log timestamps, not for knowing your precise local time.
- IPv4 vs IPv6. Which protocol your connection uses tells a site something about your ISP's infrastructure maturity, but nothing about you personally.
What your IP address does not reveal: your name, street address, email, phone number, browser history, or the specific device you are using. IP addresses identify a network connection, not a person.
IPv4 vs IPv6 — What's the Difference?
IPv4 uses 32-bit addresses, which allows for roughly 4.3 billion unique values. That sounded like plenty in 1981, but the internet ran out of unallocated IPv4 blocks in 2011. ISPs now use techniques like NAT (Network Address Translation) to share a single public IPv4 address among many customers, which means multiple households can appear to come from the same IP. A typical IPv4 address looks like 203.0.113.42.
IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, producing 340 undecillion unique values — effectively unlimited. Adoption has climbed past 40% of global traffic but is uneven across regions and ISPs. A typical IPv6 address looks like 2001:db8::1 (the :: is shorthand for a run of zero groups). Many devices now have both an IPv4 and an IPv6 address; the connection type a remote server sees depends on which protocol it advertises and which your ISP prefers.
Why Does My IP Show a Different City?
The most common reason is ISP routing. Your ISP may route your traffic through a regional hub in a different city before it reaches the internet. The IP block registered to that hub is what geolocation databases resolve — not your physical address.
Other causes: a VPN routes your traffic through a server in a different location, so every site sees the VPN server's IP. Cloudflare and other CDN or proxy services can similarly mask origin IPs. Corporate networks often route all employee traffic through a central egress point, so everyone at the company appears to come from the same city.
Tools like DevToolBox /my-ip fetch the IP directly from your browser using a client-side call to a public API — no server-side proxy is involved. This means the tool always shows the IP the external API actually received, which is the true public IP your internet traffic originates from.
Can I Hide or Change My IP Address?
VPN (Virtual Private Network). A VPN client on your device encrypts all traffic and routes it through a server in a location you choose. Sites see the VPN server's IP instead of yours. This is the most practical option for most users — VPN clients exist for every OS and most routers.
Tor. The Tor network bounces your traffic through three volunteer-run relays, each knowing only the previous and next hop. Exit node IPs change regularly, making correlation very difficult. The trade-off is speed: Tor is significantly slower than a direct connection or a VPN, which makes it impractical for bandwidth-intensive use.
Proxy servers. An HTTP or SOCKS proxy forwards your requests through an intermediary server. Simpler to configure than a VPN for specific applications (a single browser or tool) but typically unencrypted, and free proxies in particular should not be trusted with sensitive traffic.
Switching networks. Connecting to a different WiFi network or switching from WiFi to mobile data changes your public IP immediately. Mobile carriers use carrier-grade NAT, so your IP will differ from your home connection and will change when you move between cell towers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my IP address permanent? Most home internet connections use dynamic IP addresses that your ISP reassigns periodically — after a router reboot, after a DHCP lease expires, or at the ISP's discretion. Business accounts and dedicated hosting often use static IPs that do not change. Mobile IPs change frequently due to carrier-grade NAT.
Can websites track me with my IP address? Yes, within limits. Websites log IP addresses on every request, and advertisers use them as one signal among many for rough geolocation and fraud detection. An IP alone cannot uniquely identify a person, but combined with browser fingerprinting, cookies, and behavioral signals it contributes to a tracking profile. IPv6 can make individual device tracking more precise if the full address (rather than a randomized suffix) is used.
What's the difference between public and private IP?
A public IP is globally routable — it identifies your connection on the internet. A private IP (ranges like 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, 172.16–31.x.x) is used inside a local network (home router, office LAN, Kubernetes pod network) and is not visible on the internet. Your router translates between the two using NAT.
Why does "what is my ip" show the wrong location? See the section above — ISP routing hubs, VPNs, and CDN proxies are the usual culprits. Geolocation is never guaranteed to match physical location; it matches the registered location of the IP block, which may be a regional data center miles away.
Is it safe to share my IP address? Sharing your IP with a trusted party (for example, adding it to a firewall allowlist) is normal practice. Posting it publicly is lower risk than most people assume — an IP alone does not expose personal data — but it can invite port scans or targeted denial-of-service attempts if you run services from a residential connection. When in doubt, share only what is necessary.
Your public IP is the address the internet uses to reach you. Use DevToolBox's What Is My IP tool for an instant read, or the IP Lookup tool when you need to investigate an address from a log file — it returns ISP, ASN, reverse DNS, and geolocation for up to 25 addresses at once. For more on related tooling, see our guides on URL encoding and decoding and hash generation.